I am indeed running Windows Vista Business and I am scared to death to install anything. My first Vista machine was a Dell Inpirion 6400 with 2G ram and Vista Ultimate. It is about 6 months old and has been shelved until further notice. This Dell Inspirion cost us nearly $2G and is useless. It now collects dust on the hardware rack to my right while I work with my new Lenovo X61 tablet running Vista Business. As soon as a patch for Vista comes out, I’ll update the Dell and re appropriate it for a more appropriate user - someone who uses office and iTunes and nothing else.
Rex has the twin to my machine and he received the “blue screen of death” on Friday. It was after I installed Fiddler on his machine. I should really just not touch his Dell. I think it senses my anger and disposition.
I have to say things are much, much better on the Lenovo. (That Dell absolutely sucks!). Apart from a truly crappy screen, it is solid. However, I am being very careful not to install anything heavy (like Visual Studio or TortoiseSvn) on this laptop. I am relying on Remote Desktop and VirtualPC for all my development work. So far, I haven’t mastered the latter. I think I need a more reliable external hard drive.
I’m sure Microsoft will have things nailed down in the next giant update. I can’t wait. I think someone finally just put their fist on the desk and said, “ship it! We’ll use our second tier QA department and patch this sucker in a year.” echk huh, I’m ready…
A while back, I was looking for a simple support ticketing system that integrated with pop email, was easy to install, and …well, worked. I found a few free tools that had relatively inactive communities and a couple commercial products. I wasn’t really ready to lay out for a commercial product. Frankly, I could build what I needed in a couple of days and then I have that beautiful solution meets need arrangement. However, I am not one of those not invented here snobs.
Randy suggested: kayako support suite. It looks great. At $300/yr, its reasonably priced. However, it’s more than I needed at the time (or right now) and I wasn’t ready for another recurring expense.
Spiceworks
I found something wonderful, however. Spiceworks is a free support ticketing and helpdesk tool. Yah, free. It’s also installed locally, which I like. Installation is seamless. It uses its own webserver and is built in Ruby (cool factor). The first version had pretty crappy performance but they fixed that in the recent update.
One problem I ran into is that our support email address is terribly spammed. These show up as support requests in our help desk system. Closing these not only is messy but I do not want to send a reply to these senders. Its a problem that would be solved with a simple “delete” button but Spiceworks decided that “delete” should not be allowed. What I found was that the database is in a file, uses SQLLite and is very easy to work with using SQLLiteAdmin.
Removing Spam from Spiceworks
I’m having trouble getting my videos processed on YouTube. I’m using CamStudio and its not working very well. I may seek another recorder. Ideas, anyone?
I am trying to find a simple ticketing / issue tracking system that allows pop3 ticket creation that is compatible with MS IIS.
I’ve used RT (as a ticket creator, not an admin ) and want exactly this functionality. I found osTicket and eTicket, both of which support the feature (they are basically the same). However, they appear to require Perl, which I have installed (ActivePerl), but the pop admin changes fail to save.
I will continue to search but it seams as though this basic functionality would be a given. Unfortuntely, it is not easy to find. I have been debating setting up an Linux/Apache server for a while but I have one problem, I am responsible for administering and managing all installs. I have little experience with Linux and I am not really overwhelmed with free time to learn a new platform.
If anyone knows of a simple ticketing system that can retrieve tickets via pop3 and is known to run under IIS, please let me know.
I don’t need much, just simple ticketing. Hell, I could probably build one faster then I can configure a new linux server. Then the questions becomes, is it more work to maintain the code or more work to maintain the server?